New playwrights wanted for big spaces

Maddy Costa in The Guardian asks if new writers are being conditioned to keep their work small scale.

The real culprit, though, isn't a lack of ambition, but funding. Although the injection of £25m by the Arts Council into theatres for 2003-6 has done much to inspire confidence in artistic directors, the feeling pervades that they are afraid to programme new writing because it won't achieve the box-office returns necessary to balance the books. What has arisen, says [Nick] Starr (executive director at the National Theatre), is "a spirit of self-denying caution".